Sounds like Hunter x Hunter and the Chimera Ants. If you were watching anime on a site somewhere, you may have seen the Chimera Ant king as the pic for the episode since he's currently been fighting Chairman Netero._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

I've actually been keeping up-to-date on that series, and I don't see any resemblance past coming into existence fully formed.

Well, the people as eggs from tree thingie seemed kinda like what happens with the ants in Diego's palace._________________...if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.http://about.me/omardrake

from eggs? that never came into play, I was really just trying to convey this is the entire first part of their lifecycle somewhat better than "from infancy" would have. Certainly there were no macro-sized eggs to be seen, only branches. Human-shaped branches._________________butts

ugh okay so at work there is a dude among the unloaders who i can only describe in tvtropes terms as The Political Officer. he apparently has some kind of unofficial status as a quasi-manager in the unloader crew, in that he has this generally recognized authority to order us around and shit. i assumed at the outset that he was just telling us how things work for the sake of the new guys, but he also seems to have a role as the unofficial enforcer of the company culture, to badger us and criticize us when we're not working in the proper walmart way. and he also seems to be able to go to the supervisors and complain about the rest of us and bring the supervisors down on our asses. but there's no outward or official recognition of this authority, so it feels like his purpose is to outwardly be one of the unloaders and we should regard him as such, but his real purpose is to monitor us and criticize us and bring management's wrath down on us whenever he deems fit. and it's hard to ask him if he's an undercover corporate shill because if he is, then i'm probably doing myself no favors in pointing it out.

allegedly, walmart has an "open door" policy in which you can take any concerns to a manager, and that's their excuse for stifling union activity. i don't believe it and, as a matter of self-preservation, i don't trust anyone from management in this company. so they're not an option, and either way, i'm not really trying to get this guy fired or anything. i just don't want to work with what honestly feels like a political officer for the walmart party line lurking over my shoulder.

so how do you deal with a coworker like that? my method so far has been to just avoid him as much as humanly possible, but that's not really a sustainable option.

I thought we had a, "What are you reading now," OSLT thread, but couldn't find one.

Anyway, has anyone read any of the Dresden Files books? Would you recommend them?_________________The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
- Charles Darwin

the Dresden Files are the only English-language thing I've listened to as an audio book in the last decade or so

The first few had a lot of things that annoyed me greatly, but might have been less annoying if I could have gone through them faster -- listening is a lot slower than reading. Part of it is that it took me several books to get to the point where I didn't hate the characters, and several more to actually get to like them.

I suppose one could make an audiobook go ~1.5 times faster than normal without the voices getting too grating, but that's still pretty slow. Even taking advantage of the freed-up hands and eyes to do other things, it's still pretty slow. So slow that one could easily read another book at the same time as the audiobook and twice as fast and still follow along with both. AUDIOBOOKS BLAARRGGHHGHGH_________________butts

Thanks. My bad, I searched in Casual Chat._________________The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
- Charles Darwin

Y'know, I hadn't thought about it, but that is something of a problem with the series. You could make an argument for Murphy, Luccio, Georgia, Charity, or even Mab (once you understand her motivations) later in the series, but yeah... the first couple books don't really have a good female character.

(Early books Murph is just an asshole.)

That said, the quality of the series overall does improve quite a bit once you to and through Grave Peril._________________The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.